Events

  • 1959

    Students for a Democratic Society is founded

  • 1965

    First draft riots occur on college campuses

  • 1966

    Fulbright publishes The Arrogance of Power

  • 1967

    Johnson authorizes CIA to investigate antiwar activists

    35,000 protesters demonstrate outside the Pentagon
  • 1968

    Protest outside Democratic National Convention turns violent

  • 1970

    National Guard kills four protesters at Kent State University

      • Key People

    • Lyndon B. Johnson

      36th U.S. president; used the FBI to track and detain antiwar protesters

    • Richard M. Nixon

      37th U.S. president; claimed existence of “silent majority” of Americans who supported the war

    • J. William Fulbright

      Arkansas senator who criticized Johnson and U.S. war strategy in Senate hearings in 1966

    The Student Movement

    By the time of the Tet Offensive, the antiwar movement in the United States had been in full swing for quite some time. The 1960s in the United States were already a quasi-revolutionary period: the civil rights movementhad flourished under Martin Luther King Jr. and other black leaders, and the post–World War II “baby boom”had produced an especially large youth generation, who thanks to postwar prosperity were attending college in large numbers. Not surprisingly, a large student protest movement emerged as U.S. involvement in Vietnam grew.

    In 1959, students had founded the semi-socialist Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Many students at universities across the country held “teach-in” rallies, which quickly transformed into protest marches as the war progressed. By 1965, after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the SDS began to organize protest rallies against the Vietnam draft, and some students publicly burned their draft cards. Thousands of young draft dodgers fled to Canada and other countries to escape military service.

    Hippies and the Counterculture

    In many respects, the student antiwar movement reflected growing disillusionment among young Americans about politics and society as a whole. Influenced by the writers of the rebellious Beat Generation of the 1950s, young people in the United States expressed frustration about racism, gender issues, consumerism, and authority in general. Many voices in this emergent counterculture of the mid- to late 1960s challenged conventional social norms by embracing sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll music.

    These hippies and so-called flower children won the support of a surprising number of academics, including the sociologist Alfred Kinsey, who intellectualized the sexual revolution. The counterculture movement reached its peak in August 1969, when about 400,000 people descended on the Woodstock Music and Art Festival at a farm in upstate New York. With its combination of rock music and radical hippie politics, drug culture and free love, Woodstock became a symbol of the antiwar movement and an expression of the American youth counterculture of the 1960s in general.

    Antiwar Sentiment in the Public

    Although the student and hippie movements were the most visible antiwar efforts, concern about Vietnam was certainly not limited to college campuses. As early as 1965, a Gallup Poll showed the war to be the number-one national issue among the American public in general. Prominent Arkansas senator J. William Fulbright added fuel to the fire when he published his antiwar and anti-Johnson book The Arrogance of Power in 1966. He also chaired a series of nationally televised hearings in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1966, even calling in George F. Kennan, who originated the concept of containment, to voice opposition to the war.

    The CIA and COINTELPRO

    In 1967, in an attempt to stem the growing protest movements, President Lyndon B. Johnson authorized the CIA to investigate prominent antiwar activists, even though the CIA could legally spy only on foreigners. In addition, Johnson ordered the FBI to use its counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO, to monitor activists as well. Loyal FBI agents assigned to COINTELPRO arrested many protesters without legal cause or on phony conspiracy charges. Johnson’s illegal use of these government security agencies against U.S. citizens angered many and only worsened public discontentment about the war.

    Previous section Quagmire and the Tet Offensive: 1966–1968 Next page The U.S. Antiwar Movement: 1960–1970 page 2

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